Monotheistic Theodicy as Imaginary Face‐Work

In this article, I outline the cognitive process involved in accomplishing monotheistic theodicy, or the act of reconciling the belief in an omnipotent and morally perfect God with personal experiences of suffering. Based on in‐depth interviews with intimate partner violence victims, I argue that believers accomplish monotheistic theodicy by performing imaginary face‐work—or protective face‐work on the behalf of significant imagined others—that saves God's face as a morally perfect being. Believers perform this imaginary face‐work by constructing accounts that portray God as morally innocent of their suffering. These accounts fall into three main types: (1) fidelity to a higher principle, (2) ultimate benefit, and (3) shifting blame. These accounts serve as new cognitions that resolve the cognitive dissonance and concomitant negative emotions believers experience because of their suffering. Overall, the findings and analysis contribute to sociological theory by further extending the concepts of face and face‐work to imagined others.     

Observing the Rites of Autonomy,Distancing the Prospects for ‘The Spiritual’

We are acculturated to believe each healthy person is a firmly bordered republic, a kind of self‐sufficient island. With its associated values entitlement and self‐determination, this assumption has become an internalised schema within which individuals — and many therapists — evaluate personal competence and adjustment. Whilst acknowledging that an expectation of autonomy might encourage ambition and empowerment, the injunction ‘be autonomous’ may also bring with it a number of unintended consequences. These include the promotion of experiences of isolation and incompleteness, experiences that many find uncomfortable and which may come to be associated with an emerging desire for what might be called ‘the spiritual’. A question then arises: might an expectation of personal autonomy on the one hand prompt a yearning for spiritual experience yet, on the other, diminish the prospects of such an experience by marginalising the possibilities of personal and interpersonal connectedness? After developing this argument, I offer preliminary ideas to assist practitioners to envisage how the ‘secularly spiritual’ might be imagined and invoked within everyday therapeutic practice.     

Making a place in Footscray: everyday multiculturalism,ethnic hubs and segmented geography

In this article, we explore through analyses of interviews the meanings and experiences of everyday multiculturalism in a suburb in Melbourne, Australia. The people we interviewed valued and experienced diversity in different, yet interrelated ways: as an experience of multiculturalism, as providing comfort in diversity and as embodied in ethnic hubs in a segmented geography. Everyday racism can make forging belonging and connections across diverse ethnic groups difficult. Yet, Footscray is constructed as a place in which diversity is regarded as normative and protective. Our focus on a local suburb has allowed us to develop insight into the diverse ways identities are constituted through multiple understandings and experiences of diversity.     

Gender relations,transnational ties and rituals among Bosnian refugees

In this article I show how Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugees reproduce, contest and construct their ethnic and religious identities. Using ‘ritual’ in a broad sense to refer to everyday routinized activities and practices that characterize family hierarchies and gender relations, as well as more easily identifiable religious rituals, I show that rituals assert belonging to a community and an identity, but are also, in the process of construction and contestation, selectively evoked and ignored. ‘The Other’ constructed through certain rituals is not merely the non–Muslim Bosnian (Serbs and Croats), but also, for refugees, other Bosnian Muslims who stayed behind. Moreover, engagement in secular and religious rituals, and the wider issue of identity constructions cannot be understood fully without exploring the dynamics between refugees and people who have remained in Bosnia. Competing constituencies claiming ‘Bosnianness’ and ‘Muslimness’ can be found across national boundaries and complicate the attempt to construct a community of believers or nationals, or both.     

Offending Gender Being and Wanting in Male Same-Sex Desire

The hegemony of gender in theorizing sexuality has made sexual orientation the principal organizer of erotic experience. This has resulted in a heterosexual-homosexual binary in which male hetero-sexuality is presumed to hinge on the eroticization of difference while male homosexuality has been Understood as a desire for likeness. In this essay, I argue that this view of male same-sex desire is forced by the dominant heterosexist discourse that splits being and wanting into mutually exclusive categories for its understanding of normative heterosexual desire. Examining the psychic consequences of this forced splitting in both straight and gay men, I argue that subjective experiences of difference are no less central to same-sex desire and that, in gay and straight contexts alike, defensive forms of complementarity often wreak havoc with the capacity to love.     

Scoring Ecstasy: MDMA,Consumerism and Spirituality in the Early Fiction of Irvine Welsh

Ecstasy (MDMA) is a drug whose short-term dangers have been demonstrated by a number of deaths, and whose long-term effects are still unknown. It is also illegal. Nevertheless, people continue to take it. This essay aims to address the question of why they do so. I argue that MDMA's ability to enhance communication and offer people a version of religious ritual means that the drug has the potential, at least, to modify subjectivity and intersubjective relationships. In particular, I study how one contemporary novelist and commentator on the club/rave scene, Irvine Welsh, explores this potential in his work. I focus mainly on his novel Marabou Stork Nightmares, the novella “The Undefeated” (from the collection Ecstasy) and the title story of the collection The Acid House. I am especially concerned with how Welsh reads MDMA's problematic relationships to consumer capitalism and to the ecstatic or otherworldly states that are loosely described by his characters as “spirituality.” I also address Welsh's accounts of LSD experience in the same stories in order to show how he situates the identity of the drug user as poised between the sense of self-affirmation and empathy offered by MDMA and the sense of self-annihilation (via an encounter with subjectless language, or Foucault's “thought of the outside”) offered by the LSD experience. I argue that the reason for this bipolar construction of subjectivity in Welsh's work is his wish to explore the drug-using subject's conflicting relationship to consumerism, which offers neither selfaffirmation nor self-annihilation, but a merely passive relation to experience, in which the subject's task is to absorb (consume) images and material goods. I will suggest that in playing out these conflicts, Welsh's stories show how the literary and philosophical tradition linking drug use and mysticism refuses to die; in effect, his work revitalizes the ideas of de Quincey, Huxley, Leary and others, reshaping them for the consumerist age while never being uncritical of house culture or the illicit drug scene. Like Derrida in “The Rhetoric of Drugs”, Welsh seeks a position on the issue that avoids the oversimplifications of much pro- and anti-drug rhetoric. Welsh's work is as much about consumerism and spirituality as about drugs, and his exploration of the subject positions of MDMA users is bound up with a dual critique of late capitalism and house culture that exposes the problematic connexions between them. His work shows, for instance, that Ecstasy does not offer an escape from the cash nexus: it is, is in many ways, just another consumer product tied to the leisure industry. While Ecstasy can initiate a new spiritual awareness in some users, this is best sustained by distancing oneself from the “chaos” of hedonistic excess and reducing the frequency of MDMA use. I conclude that Welsh is not so much an apologist for dangerous illegal drugs as an intelligent critic of consumerism.     

Understanding the differences between climate change deniers and believers’ knowledge,media use,and trust in related information sources

The purpose of this study was to understand the similarities and differences between climate change deniers and believers’ knowledge, news media consumption, and trust in related information sources. Using surveys conducted among 310 climate change-denying American adults, and 337 climate change believers, this study investigated these points with a few surprising results. As expected, climate change deniers displayed significantly lower levels of trust in the scientific community and the EPA than did climate change believers. Furthermore, commonly noted points of attack used by climate change disinformation efforts were found to have been accepted by climate change deniers, and disturbingly, in some cases by climate change believers as well. Implications for public relations scholars and practitioners are discussed (117 words).     

Staying Alive: Matricide and the Ethical-Political Aspect of Mother-Daughter Relations

In this article I argue that an account of nonmatricidal relations between mothers and daughters should include an account of the transformative process through which mothers and daughters can overcome the damage of phallocentrism. I further argue that as a lived experience, mother-daughter relations are always actualized in relations with a normative background, authoritative discursive practices, and social institutions, all of which constitute motherhood in different contexts. Transforming this space means challenging these contents and practices. Thus, it follows that creating nonmatricidal relations includes an aspect of witnessing in which the mother addresses to the daughter her refusal of phallocentric practices and values. By becoming the addressee of the mother’s subjectivity, as expressed in her ethico-political refusal, the daughter constitutes relations of difference. Reading the biblical story of Lot’s wife and her daughters, I suggest that the act of witnessing the violence of divine law has constituted a space between Lot’s wife and her daughters wherein they could create a lineage based on resistance to phallocentric law and affirmation of an alternative ethics.     

Doing Fatherhood Online: Men's Parental Identities,Experiences, and Ideologies on Social Media

Online discourse about parenting has grown with the expansion of social media technologies. With a community of “dad bloggers” developing in North America, further investigation into how men write about fatherhood on the Internet is needed. In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of 201 blog posts written by 40 dad bloggers. Adopting a social psychological perspective, I examine how fatherhood is constructed across lines of identity, experience, and ideology. My findings illustrate how dad bloggers reinforce and reshape family discourses in their writing about parental role models, becoming a father, work–family balance, generativity, and “good” and “bad” dads. Social media use is discussed as a part of fathering in everyday life and as a tool to display, promote, and normalize involved fatherhood.     

Brokenheartedness and accountability

ABSTRACT

In this article, I reflect on relationship and movement building across power lines that I have experienced or witnessed in and outside of academia. I argue that the “anesthetic aesthetic” of whiteness, as illuminated by Mab Segrest, compels those like myself who are trained to be white to distance ourselves from the pain and suffering of others (as well as our own) in order to accept and assimilate into the hegemonic normative systems of power. I offer stories from my experience of feminist and queer organizing that demonstrate how this distancing looks and feels, and places of where it might be transformed. Then, I turn to healing justice as a praxis that creates communal spaces for naming, recognizing, and healing from violence, spaces to share our brokenheartedness, and to serve as a way of breaking up the gravitational pulls of white supremacist patriarchy.     

Recognition and judgement in social work

The purpose of this article is to argue for recognition as a normative ideal for social work and to confront the ideal with the reality found in the social institutions. I shall use the concept ‘judgement’ to describe institutional routines and ways of thinking which constitute barriers to recognition. In the first part, I outline the normative ideal and show its relevance for practical social work on the basis of social clients’ experiences of disrespect. In the second, I explain the concept of judgement and criticise the prevailing forms of judgement to be found in social institutions. In my interpretation these pose an obstacle to recognition.     

The Flayed and Exquisite Self of Travelers: Managing Face and Emotions in Strange Places

Travelers who cross cultural and linguistic borders encounter recurrent failures of social competence. People routinely violate the linguistic and nonlinguistic normative order, and have few means at their disposal for repair work. These episodes lead to the experience of a flayed self: a temporary, painful identity born of one's inability to display competence, combined with heightened, exquisite self‐consciousness. Using interactionist scaffolding and travelers' accounts, I examine this self, its commitments, and resources. I examine four techniques used to avoid flayed and exquisite selfhood: denying negative experience, externalizing the causes of that experience, engaging in the mind cure, and doing time work.     

Disability in the news: a reconsideration of reading

By making use of a disability studies perspective informed by phenomenology, this paper interrogates the social process of reading news articles that depict disability as if it is only limit. The paper begins from my experience of reading an article that assumes reader-willingness to imagine disability as a kind of limit without possibility, without life. I go on to consider how the meaning of disability is actually produced by normative forms of cultural perception that recognize certain bodies as a kind of negation. Reading, a common mode of perception within literate western cultures, is used to problematize how mainstream media configures embodiment. Finally, the paper raises the ever present possibility that the ways in which impaired bodies are typically limited may contain the possibility of alternatives that disturb and re-make the everyday modes of perceiving disability.     

Quand l'expertise se heurte au pouvoir souverain : la nation américaine face à la prolifération nucléaire, 1945-1953

After the Second World War, the applications of nuclear science raise a crucial threat to international security as far as their civil applications can be turned into military devices. Debates about nuclear proliferation offer a fruitful site to analyze the production of an expertise in bio-security. This paper analyzes in particular how experts have envisioned the role of nation-states and sovereign power in relation to policies aimed at ensuring the security of populations against the risk of nuclear annihilation. It explores what conceptions of sovereignty different experts constructed; what disciplines (political science, natural science, law) were mobilized in this debate; what strategies of institutionalization American experts followed; what publics were targeted by these experts (officials, think tanks, academic publics, media). Experts' conceptions of threats and insurances as well as the institutional paths they build to access policy circles explain which of the experts' policies diffused among policy circles. This approach, which focuses on the production of ideas rather than on the diffusion of administrative norms, complements neo-institutionalist studies of the internationalization of scientific modes of regulation.     

Protestant women in the late Soviet era: gender,authority, and dissent

At the peak of the anti-religious campaigns under Nikita Khrushchev, communist propaganda depicted women believers as either naïve dupes, tricked by the clergy, or as depraved fanatics; the Protestant “sektantka” (female sectarian) was a particularly prominent folk-devil. In fact, as this article shows, women’s position within Protestant communities was far more complex than either of these mythical figures would have one believe. The authors explore four important, but contested, female roles: women as leaders of worship, particularly in remote congregations where female believers vastly outnumbered their male counterparts; women as unofficial prophetesses, primarily within Pentecostal groups; women as mothers, replenishing congregations through high birth rates and commitment to their children’s religious upbringing; and women as political actors in the defence of religious rights. Using a wide range of sources, which include reports written by state officials, articles in the church journal, letters from church members to their ecclesiastical leaders in Moscow, samizdat texts, and oral history accounts, the authors probe women’s relationship with authority, in terms of both the authority of the (male) ministry within the church, and the authority of the Soviet state.     

Disabled academics: a case study in Canadian universities

Though Canadian universities are legally required to accommodate disabled employees, disabled faculty still experience difficulties navigating neoliberal performance standards and medicalized conceptualizations of disability. Drawing on data from a qualitative study with Canadian university faculty, this paper explores the experiences of five disabled academics. Our analysis draws on post-structural understandings of neoliberalism, discourse, disciplinary power, and governmentality, as well as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concepts of the fit and misfit. Though the sample is small, this analysis suggests universities pose disabling contexts for academics. Disability is cast as individual responsibility, leaving disabled academics navigating accommodations without institutional support. The normative academic constructed through a discourse of efficiency and productivity is the measure against which disabled academics are evaluated, requiring self-governance to produce themselves as ‘good enough’ academics. Although higher education environments are increasingly diverse, disabled academics are still having to prove their right to exist in academia, hindering their abilities to participate fully.     

A DESIGN OF NORMATIVE SOCIOLOGY BASED ON THE RATIONAL CHOICE PARADIGM

Abstract  In this paper, I metatheoretically examine a design of normative sociology. Normative sociology is the normative-scientific study in sociology. The substance of normative science is the conceptual examination of values or value judgments. According to Coleman (1974) and Faran, (1989) et al., sociologists should contribute to normative science by using ideas from general sociological theory. There is a useful traditional enterprise for this aim in sociology; that is the study of the problem of order, particularly the study of it based on the rational choice paradigm. Seiyama (1992) points to the limits of the rational choice paradigm. I propose three aims of social theory, and claim that the study of the problem of order based on this paradigm is useful when our purpose is normative model-building. I call the problem of order as a subject of the study for this purpose "the value-theoretical problem of order." This examination can clear up some of the theoretical confusion surrounding the problem of order and show the methodological basis of normative sociology based on the rational choice paradigm.     

The spiritual genogram in family therapy

Spiritual and religious issues often surface during marital and family therapy. In this article, I describe a spiritual genogram that is a multigenerational map of family members' religious and spiritual affiliations, events, and conflicts. Used as a tool in family therapy, the spiritual genogram enables clients to make sense of their families' religious/spiritual heritage and to explore the ways in which their experiences impact present couple or family issues.